Tag: Photo gallery

360°


Cathedral renovations in USA

Some of the niftiest software is free. For instance, Hugin, which stitches 360° panoramas together from your pictures. You can then upload the panoramas to 360 Cities for everyone to explore. The basic membership there is also free. The above is the interior of the Wichita cathedral last week.

Although the ideal camera for making panoramas is a full-frame DSLR with a fisheye lens, any camera that isn’t junk will work, possibly even cellphone cameras. Those who travel to picturesque places might want to keep an eye out for possible panoramas.

Fish music

Roger Netherton, a young friend of mine, placed second this year in the old-time fiddle contest at Winfield Friday. He celebrated by heading over to Carp Camp, where he led the assembled eccentrics in a couple of tunes. Here’s the first. It starts off with Roger alone.

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Carp1-2012.mp3]

There are more pictures of carp people below the fold.

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What the hell —

I posted a couple of pictures just before I left the office today. When I checked this site an hour later, the post had reverted back to “draft” status, with most of the text missing. Later during the evening, the post reappeared, but now it’s gone again. I’m guessing that there are some problems with the server that hosts my site.

Here are the pictures, again. We’ll see if they are still here in the morning.

All the scaffolding that filled the Wichita cathedral for much of the year is gone now, and you can see the work of the painters. There are 280 rosettes in the church, each one freshly gilded.

Ping pong balls from heaven

It’s been a noisy evening, and there’s probably more to come. This is a snapshot from my front porch a few minutes ago.

*****

I loaned my good camera to a colleague whose Nikon is out for repair. Yesterday evening I went to the botanical garden to see if I could get some good close-ups with my cheap go-everywhere toy. Most of the pictures were blurry, but a couple were tolerably sharp, such as the one above.

The doctor is in

The most common rose in cultivation, currently furnishing a purplish-red accent in many Wichita gardens, is not a hybrid tea, floribunda or shrub rose, but a hybrid of Rosa wichuriana called “Dr. Huey.” It’s widely used as a rootstock for bud grafting. If suckers aren’t regularly removed, or if the grafted portion weakens or dies, Dr. Huey will take over. The flower in the above picture is about two inches in diameter.

Continue reading “The doctor is in”

The morning after

It’s a pleasant day today. The sun even came out for a while. It will probably require a few days for the damages from yesterday to be fully assessed, but my neighborhood looks fine.

Although we get some of the most violent weather in the world here in the plains thanks to North America’s topography, I don’t really worry all that much about tornadoes. During stormy weather, there are constant updates on the radio and radar on my computer monitor, and most homes have basements. Dangerous though they are, tornadoes are much less a threat in Kansas than they are in Bangladesh, where the deadliest twister on record struck not all that long ago.

What I do worry about are gangs with guns. I live in an older neighborhood that borders some very different worlds. Go a few blocks south, and you are surrounded by expensive river-front homes. Go a few blocks east, and you’ll hear norteño. A few weeks ago, the place nearby where a scholarly friend of mine used to live was the scene of a gang shooting.

Ducks and monkeys

For most of the summer, non-migratory Canadian geese controlled the north bank of the river on my way to work. Now it’s occupied by a corps of ducks. Is there something going on I should know about?

Also in my camera: public enemy #3.

Another approach to weeding:

*****

There has been some loose talk recently about monkeys typing Shakespeare. This gives me an excuse to mention a couple of favorite short stories. Russell Maloney’s “Inflexible Logic” is the second-best tale on the topic. The best is R.A. Lafferty‘s “Been a Long, Long Time,” which unfortunately is not available online. I did find another Lafferty story, though, which might illustrate why I have a shelf of his books.

In the pink

This has been a brutal year (-17°F in February, 110°+ repeatedly this summer) and it shows in gardens. Yews and arbor vitae are badly damaged if not dead, hostas are shriveled and sugar maples have few intact leaves left for their fall display. However, the naked ladies, a.k.a. Lycoris sqamigera, spent the worst of the heat undeground and look just dandy right now.

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I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days. While I’m gone, you can study the saxophone solo in “Tank!”